A new translation of several Hindi discourses given by Osho in Ahmedabad and Mumbai has been published recently, entitled ‘Into the Void’. In an excerpt from this riveting book, we show Osho’s vision for future meditation centers worldwide that will make available all 112 methods of meditation.
I want to form scientific laboratories at meditation centers where you will be able to understand your anger, your worries, your tensions, your insomnia, your bodily diseases – why and how they arise, and how they can be overcome. They can be overcome only with your help; you need to be able to recognize them.
That will be the other side of meditation; it will try to remove the worthless things you have accumulated. Afterward, it will systematically try to introduce you to the four layers I talked about. It will supply the conditions that allow you to enter those levels. Once the garbage of the outer world has been thrown out, it becomes very easy to enter within yourself. It is not difficult. It will take less time for you to grasp meditation than the time that you unnecessarily spend talking nonsense.
Maeterlinck has written somewhere that a man wouldn’t have to work as hard to reach heaven as he now does to reach hell. Less effort is needed to enter meditation than to be angry. If, instead of wasting our energy in fighting with others, we would use that energy to transform ourselves, we would have seen the reflection of God within us a long time ago. If we spent a hundredth of the time on the path within as we spend running on the outside, we would reach our center. A person who does not reach his center cannot reach anywhere, no matter how much he runs around in the outer world. A person who cannot listen to the music of silence within himself will only reach hell and nowhere else, even if he travels to the remotest places in the world. We carry our heaven or hell with us.
The meditation centers have to be given a scientific basis – no tradition, no connection with a religion, but open to all religions. They will also be concerned with discovering the scientific bases of all the experiments on meditation done by the various religions.
There are 112 different methods of meditation in the world and each of them is distinctly beautiful. A human being can reach the divine through 112 methods. Some of the methods are quite different from the other. Someone who follows a particular method may believe that the other methods are wrong, but in fact, all 112 methods can lead everyone to the path of meditation, peace, bliss, and truth.
The meditation centers will be able to experiment with all 112 methods. For the first time on the face of this earth, there will be places where, at a single location, all known methods of meditation will be available together. We would not like to lose a single person. Whatever method each person uses to reach the divine, he will receive guidance in exactly that method.
The most peculiar methods are available; you may not even have heard of them. I would like to tell you about one or two of them. There is a small method in Tibet that is called “balancing.” Sometime, at home, after your bath, stand up and spread your legs. Notice whether you feel more weight on the left or on the right leg. If you feel pressure on the left side, try shifting it slowly to the right side. Maintain that for two seconds and then shift is back to the left side. Do this exercise of shifting the pressure from one side to the other for about fifteen days. The Tibetan method then says to try to have no pressure on either leg; the pressure remains between your legs. After about three weeks of this experiment, when you find yourself in the center – when you are exactly in the center, the pressure will be neither on the left leg nor on the right – at that time, right at that very moment, you will be able to enter meditation.
Superficially it will seem very simple to you, but when you do it, you will find it both simple and difficult. It seems very straightforward; it can be described in just two sentences. Thousands of people have achieved bliss through this method. When you become balance – tilting neither to the right nor to the left but remaining exactly in the middle – you will find that the balancing has formed a part of your consciousness also. Your consciousness is also balanced. At that very moment you enter into yourself just like an arrow.
There are 112 such methods in the world. I would like to give a detailed, scientific basis for these methods in the meditation centers, so that you not only understand them, but you also do them. If not one method, then another method, so that you do not leave the meditation center disappointed. These are the ultimate 112 methods; there cannot be more than that. If one of them does not work, another one will work; if that one also does not work, try the next one. You can find out very easily which method is going to work for you. The technique through which you can discover a particular method for yourself is also a science.
If we could build such meditation centers in the major cities of our country and also outside the country, we would be able to give a ray of hope to mankind, which is undergoing a lot of pain and sorrow at present and is unable to see any path out of it. Until now, everything we believed would improve people’s lives has failed. We thought that when people had enough food, everything would be all right. Today more than half the world has enough food but that has changed nothing. We thought that if people had enough clothing, had proper homes, proper roads, proper treatment and medicines, and if diseases were controlled, they would be happy and at peace. Today half the people in the world have all these amenities, but not one has seen peace or happiness.
Surprisingly, what has happened is that those who have everything are the ones who are the most disturbed, restless and troubled. In a sense, a poor country is fortunate because at least their hopes are still alive. They know that socialism will come, the economy will get better, more wealth will be distributed, and everything will be all right. In the countries where all that has been achieved, those hopes have also been lost; people are depressed and utterly disappointed. Never before in the whole history of mankind has there been such hopelessness.
Today, no other country is as hopeless as America, and yet it is one of the most prosperous and well-off countries. By any comparison, it has everything that anyone could wish for, and yet people there feel they do not have anything. There is a reason for the hopelessness. People became disillusioned by all the things they thought would bring happiness.
Now we have to go back and listen again to Buddha, to Krishna, to Christ, and to Mohammed. They already told us a long time ago that until you have experienced yourself, you do not achieve anything, even though you have everything. We never understood them. We could not understand because it seemed imaginary, utopian. We could relate to the people who said we should have wealth, and we should have homes, because that sounded practical and down-to-earth. It is the greatest paradox that, historically, the so-called practical people have proved to be utopian, while people who were utopian are mostly proving to be practical.
Unfortunately, religion cannot be brought back through the old ways. Religion will have to enter through new paths; it will need to be scientific and technical.
[…] In the future, science and technology can be used in the places where people are living, and all the arrangements yogis made with great difficulty can be had right there. That is possible through science. An ordinary man can easily obtain those facilities. The meditation centers will be built with the help of science and technology; they will be temples only in the sense that they will be doors to meditation and to godliness. Otherwise they will be scientific laboratories, where all the discoveries man has made about himself will be fully used.
Osho, Into the Void, Ch 2 (excerpt, translated from Hindi)
Available at oshoviha.org – oshoworldgalleria.com – amazon.in
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